While Hollywood matches the massive logistics of D-Day by storming the beaches of Normandy with Saving Private Ryan (1998) and The Longest Day (1962), British film goes the opposite route in Overlord (1975). It's a major rediscovery of an extraordinary take on that WWII pivot point – haunting, austere, intimately scaled, expressive, sometimes dreamlike, often even surprisingly quiet, considering its subject matter. It's the kind of film that could only have been made by having Britain's Imperial War Museum throw its considerable resources behind the project and putting it in the hands of a filmmaker fortuitously equipped to tell the story. In fact, it stemmed from the Imperial War Museum's hiring of American filmmaker Stuart Cooper as a follow-up to a previous World War II documentary project, on the so-called Overlord Embroidery, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry commissioned to commemorate the Allied liberation of Europe.

Cooper never completed the Embroidery documentary, plunging instead into the thousands of hours of World War II footage held by the museum, while figuring out how to do justice to the epic story of D-Day from an English point of view. He and his co-writer Christopher Hudson soon found themselves relying heavily on cinematographer John Alcott as well, not only to match the archival footage to the made-up bits involved in framing the story through the eyes of a solitary young English Everyman journeying from his parents' house to a beach in Normandy. Dressed in tweed jacket, white shirt and tie, he feels a pang at leaving his cocker spaniel and packs a copy of David Copperfield to read on the train. It's a subtle way of getting us inside the head of private-to-be Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner), from which piercingly immediate shards of the story emerge at regular intervals.

Ironically, Alcott was to win an Oscar® a year later for the stunning palette he immediately afterward brought to Stanley Kubrick's sumptuous-looking Barry Lyndon (1975). Here, he turns what could have been the limitation of sometimes blurry and excessively gray black and white into an asset. Realizing such a look perfectly suits the dream state, he conveys Tom's recurring nightmares of a figure running into the camera on a battlefield, throwing his arms up and falling face forward as he's mowed down. In other words, Tom is haunted by a vision of his own death. So are we. Not that he and his mates do anything but plod bravely forward. An actual old barracks was recommissioned for the filming of Tom's training. It begins with him arriving late (having missed a train connection), and walking into a barracks empty save for a sergeant lying on a cot reading a James M. Cain paperback.

Tom's inexorable progress along the military assembly line turning out cannon fodder is intercut with still startling archival footage. In fact, the film opens with the sound of marching feet, soon followed by a shot of a military column on the move, which is followed in turn by arresting aerial footage, first of a German plane bombing an English village, then from a British Lancaster bombing Germany back. The bombing of London's East End docklands during the Blitz is made searingly vivid with footage capturing the ensuing chaos and danger, with firemen trying not to be crushed by falling masonry from collapsing buildings while swinging into action with their hoses. Repeatedly, it's the unexpected, removed from overly familiar war movie tropes, that yanks us into the immediacy of the fierce dispensing of death, as when a landing craft of invading soldiers is dashed by a massive wave against a rock. When Tom and his wartime buddies hit the beach, the effect is anything but that of all hell breaking loose. Instead, you're surprised by how unexpectedly quiet it is, as the front of the boat is lowered onto the beach to serve as a ramp, and the soldiers seem to slide silently down it, toward what we and they know will momentarily be a barrage of bullets and grenades from the entrenched German bunkers.

The juxtapositions are daring, expressive. For a moment, the landing craft empties and we see Tom alone in it, kissing a nice girl (Julie Neesam) he met at a dance, during which they both politely expressed interest in each other and plan to rendezvous the next evening. But the date is never kept because Tom and his detachment are suddenly shipped out that morning. A lid in keeping with British reticence is kept on the emotive dimension of Overlord. That spareness of expression makes it all the more powerful, however, as we're reminded that Cooper not only drew on film footage, but on soldiers' letters and diaries as well. Again and again, we're reminded that this film differs from most in that its sponsorship meant that it wasn't made to be sold to audiences, but to do right by its subject matter. In short, it's a matter of stewardship, not salesmanship.

One decision that never would have passed muster at a commercial studio script conference is Cooper's insistence on finding ways to express and make us empathize with Tom's solitariness along with an avoidance of macho heroics. Time and again, he comes across as a nice, decent, untested boy – surely not much more than a boy, only recently out of university – who on his way to report for duty is dressed like a young man on his way to a job at, say, a bank. It's not that he avoids company, or is in any way a loner. We smile wryly when two buddies talk him into a night on the town and a fleeting – it can't be called furtive – liaison in a darkened theater with a woman who picks him up. The sequence is not unleavened with humor – a smartly cheeky bit of film editing, in which we see Hitler's legions on parade, made to look silly as they goose-step to a hugely popular English dance tune, "The Lambeth Walk," while Der Fuhrer beams onscreen at the spectacle from his reviewing stand and Tom enjoys a quick grope in his theater seat.

The success of Overlord – one might almost say the unique success -- lies in its brilliant accretion of tiny telling details made vivid. Some are handed to Cooper from the archives – a test of a giant wheel firing rockets as it rolls along a beach, another sort of steamroller with barbed-wire cutting blades. Mostly, though, Overlord (the British code name for D-Day) rides the unadorned plainness of Stirner's face. It's remarkable. So is his wistful, rueful isolation in the context of a war we've been taught to think of as a heroic nonstop communal effort. Its unadorned simplicity and concreteness of detail are a large part of what makes the film so unexpectedly mesmerizing. Overlord is a trenchantly triumphant collaboration between found art and made art.

Producer: James Quinn
Director: Stuart Cooper
Screenplay: Christopher Hudson, Stuart Cooper
Cinematography: John Alcott
Music: Paul Glass
Film Editing: Jonathan Gili
Cast: Brian Stirner (Tom), Davyd Harries (Jack), Nicholas Ball (Arthur), Julie Neesam (The Girl), Sam Sewell (The Trained Soldier), John Franklyn-Robbins (Dad), Stella Tanner (Mum), Harry Shacklock (Stationmaster), David Scheuer (Medical Officer), Ian Liston (Barrack Guard), Lorna Lewis (Prostitute), Stephen Riddle (Dead German Soldier), Jack Le White (Barman), Mark Penfold (Photographer), Micaela Minelli (Little Girl), Elsa Minelli (Little Girl's Mother).
BW-83m. Letterboxed.

by Jay Carr

Sources:
IMDb
AFI Catalogue
Stuart Cooper interview, The Guardian, January 18, 2008